


Together, Alone

by commas_and_ampersands



Category: Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon | Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon, Doctor Who
Genre: Crossover, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-03
Updated: 2011-04-03
Packaged: 2018-03-07 11:33:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 995
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3172702
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/commas_and_ampersands/pseuds/commas_and_ampersands
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Doctor has a question for the Guardian of Time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Together, Alone

**Author's Note:**

> Set directly after season 4.

"I have a question."

Pluto pursed her lips. It was an unfamiliar voice for a familiar man (assuming one could comfortably call him a man). The timbre quaked with the secret knowledge of nine centuries no matter how innocuous his statement was. She knew him from this and his lack of concern for social niceties.

That, and he'd found his way to the gate in the first place.

Sailor Pluto turned, arching her eyebrow into the crest of a pyramid. He looked younger than the last time she'd seen him, but she knew he was older that most people could even fathom. She wasn't most people. "Red trainers. Chic."

He ignored her, barreling on, but this was hardly new. "What exactly do you do all day?"

"We've been over this," she reminded him.

He leaned forward with a grin. "Can you be sure of that? All the wibbley-wobbley timey-wimey out of order... stuff?"

"Articulate as ever," she quipped, biting her cheek to keep from smiling back. "I am familiar with the... _timey-wimey,_ Doctor. To my estimation, this is your fifth time seeing me. Unfortunately, it is my seventh."

The Doctor frowned. "Unfortunately?"

"Last time, the TARDIS landed on Small Lady's tea set." Pluto took a long, steadying breath. "You have no idea what the princess's ideas of a good apology are."

The Doctor beamed, apparently delighted at the prospect of meeting the heir of the planet Earth. "Actually, that sounds brilliant."

Pluto did not agree. "Your question? I'm afraid I forgot."

He scoffed. "As if you forget anything. You just don't want to answer."

Pluto hated that she couldn't fool him. To be fair, she hadn't tried so very hard. She wondered if he threw her for that much of a loop or if she simply didn't have the patience to try. "Doctor, you are perfectly aware that I guard the Time Gate."

"Well, YES, but what do you... do? Just stand there? Play chess with yourself?"

Pluto snorted. "Oh, Venus would love to have heard you said that."

The Doctor frowned. "Have I met her?"

"Apparently not." She smirked. "Something to look forward to."

The Doctor did not look as thrilled at this prospect. Her smile must have been truly alarming. "No, but really. What do you _do_?"

She gave him a hard look, perhaps harder than she should have. It was so difficult to soften her edges where he was concerned. "Not everyone has temporal ADD and feels the urge to jump from century to century at the drop of a hat."

He smiled at her. It could have brightened the sun. "Temporal ADD! I like that! Donna would like that!"

He turned as if to relay this information to companion waiting in the TARDIS, but then stopped, his face falling. Pluto's heart lurched. His friends always met with tragedy one way or another. She wondered how he had lost this one.

She could have lectured him, and she wanted to, but she swallowed it. She realized by now that he would never listen. "I'm sorry."

"Yes, well...." he sighed. He turned back to her. So much pain in his eyes - enough to douse a star.

For a moment, she cursed Usagi for increasing her capacity to empathize.

"Sometimes I sing," Pluto said quietly.

He paused. "Do you? Didn't know you could."

"Everyone can," she corrected. "As for skill, I must admit to being somewhat lacking."

The Doctor laughed, though not whole-heartedly. It would be some time for that again. "Anything else?"

Pluto inhaled deeply. These were not things she talked about normally.

But the Doctor was not normal. The Doctor was the only one to whom she could whisper her secrets.

"I recite speeches from forgotten plays, poems that burned to ash and floated into the ether. I laugh at what the history books get wrong. I look in the caves and ditches that hold the lost treasures of the centuries and wonder if anyone will ever think to find them. I remember the true faces of the true heroes and disguised geniuses in our history, and I pity their loss and ours. I search for reasons behind the start of every war, and I find nothing."

The Doctor waited a moment to see if she would continue. There was nothing but the silence of Time swirling around them, which was not silent at all. It was just they were the only two people who could hear it.

"You watch. You reflect. You guard," he surmised.

She nodded in assent. "I have told you."

He exhaled sharply, thrusting his hands into his pockets. "How do you stand it? Staying in one place, all alone?"

She smiled knowingly, certain that they have at last come to it. He wanted to be more like her, foolish man who was so much more than a man.

"You select an uneventful century and allow yourself to go quietly insane," she admitted. "Then you pick up the pieces and learn to be lonely."

There was nothing he could say to that.

She turned her back on him, ending the conversation. "We are more different than similar, Doctor. Do not aspire to be as I am."

It was so quiet for a moment that she almost fooled herself into thinking he was gone.

"I love them," he murmured. "And I always leave them, one way or another."

He must have truly wrecked this strange woman's life if he came running to Pluto, seeking out the quiet for even a moment. He hated standing still - hated knowing that somewhere, she was out there, standing still for all eternity. He said once that his skin itched when he was around her. But still, he sought her out.

Was he punishing himself?

"I love people too, you know," she murmured.

"Of course you do," he answered, his voice growing more distant. "How else could you stand this?"

Finally, he left her. The TARDIS whined, then vanished.

And so they were alone.


End file.
